THE PROBLEM
OF EVIL:

Exonerating
God

Updated June 25, 2018

By: Geoffrey
K. Mondello

Prefacing the
Problem

No
single factor is invoked more often in people turning away from God,
or in their failing to believe in Him, than the occurrence —
note that I do not say
“existence”*—
of evil, especially as it manifests itself in suffering. The
occurrence of evil appears incompatible with God, or at least a
coherent conception of God as both — and simultaneously —
absolutely good and absolutely powerful. That God and the
occurrence of evil should coexist appears logically contradictory
and ontologically incompatible. The one is effectively the
abrogation of the other. The existence of God, it is argued,
precludes (or ought to preclude) the occurrence of evil and the
occurrence of evil precludes (or ought to preclude) the existence of
God.

While we can readily adduce empirical evidence, that is to say,
tangible instances, of evil to discredit the existence of
God, the availability of evidence to corroborate the
existence of God, on the other hand, is so exiguous that even
when such instances are invoked they are deemed extraordinary
events in the affairs of men; indeed, events so far from commonplace
that we call them miraculous — that is to say, inexplicable
interventions conditionally attributed to God in the absence of
alternate explanations that may yet be forthcoming. Whether
or not this is a sufficient, if concise, summary, the general
implication is clear: evidence of evil overwhelmingly exceeds
evidence of God. If sheer preponderance is the criterion to which we
appeal, God loses.

Evil comes as a scandal to the believer who asks, “How can this be,
given the existence of God?”

To the disbeliever no such scandal arises — only scorn for
the believer who is left in perplexity, unable to deny the existence
of God on the one hand while equally unable to deny the occurrence
of evil on the other.

We appear to be consigned to either nihilistic resignation in the
one camp (evil is somehow ontologically inherent and rampant in the
universe although we cannot explain why), or an unreasoned and
therefore untenable affirmation of the existence of God — despite
the contradictory concurrence of evil — in the other. Both appear to
be damned to perplexity.

Neither has satisfactorily answered the question implicit within
every occurrence of evil: “Why?”

The Problem ... and why we must respond to it

Before
we begin our attempt to arrive at an answer to the problem of evil,
we must first clearly summarize and completely understand the nature
of the problem itself.

While this may appear obvious, all too often our efforts to make
sense of the experience of evil in our lives and in the world fail
to adequately address implicit or unstated premises apart
from which no answer is either forthcoming or possible. Failing to
follow the premises, we fail to reach a conclusion. Instead, we
reflexively seize what is incontrovertible (the occurrences of evil)
and, understanding nothing of its antecedents, satisfy ourselves
that it is entirely a mystery — in other words, utterly
incomprehensible to us — in fact, so opaque to our ability to reason
it through (which we do not) that we throw up our hands in either
frustration or despair, declaring that either it is the will of God
in a way we do not understand, or that there can be no God in light
of the enormities that we experience. In either case — whether we
affirm that God exists despite them, or deny that He exists
because of them — we confront the experience of evil as an
impenetrable mystery. Such a facile answer, I suggest, is not a
satisfactory state of affairs at all.

Antecedents

We can only speculate upon the pre-Adamicorigin
of evil. That evil preceded the creation of Adam and Eve in
the Garden of Paradise is clear. We are given no explanation of the
genesis of evil as it predated the creation of man. We only know
that it had already manifested itself in the Garden — as something
already extrinsic to — and antagonistic toward it. That is
to say, in the Creation Narrative, we encounter from the outset the
parallel existence of the serpent (an embodiment of evil) with man
prior to the Fall (I say parallel, because the serpent
possesses a supernatural existence not in kind
with, but parallel to and contemporaneous with, the
created nature of man, much in the way that the
supernatural being of Angels coexist with the natural
being of men).

While we are unable to explain evil prior to the creation of man
(simply because no narrative exists to which we can appeal apart
from one utterance of Christ 1), we are not, however, for
this reason absolved from explaining not only how evil came to
obtrude upon the affairs of men, but why it is not
incompatible with our conception of God as all-good and
all-powerful. Philosophy calls this endeavor a theodicy. We needn’t
be intimidated by this, nor think ourselves unequal to it, as we
shall see.

To further compound the issue, the problem is no mere academic
matter from which we can stand aloof as so many theorists to
hypothetical abstractions. It is a problem that vexes us, lacerates
us at every turn, believer and unbeliever alike. It has a direct and
painful bearing upon us; it affects us, afflicts us, and, yes,
sometimes crushes us. Despite the refuge that the believer has taken
in the notion of mystery, or the cynicism to which the unbeliever
consigns himself in hopeless resignation, each cry out, equally and
withal, “Why … ?” — especially when the evil
experienced or perpetrated is an effrontery to justice, or a
violation of innocence.

The skeptic, most often acasualty of evil, cannot
reconcile the occurrence of evil with the existence of God. The two
appear to be not just rationally incompatible but mutually
exclusive. What is more, the empirical evidence of evil is far more
preponderant and far more compelling than any evidence that can be
readily adduced to the existence of God. The believer, on the other
hand, is painfully perplexed, and sometimes deeply scandalized, by
this seeming incompatibility which often buffets the faith which
alone sustains his belief — the faith that, somehow, the occurrence
of evil and the existence of God are not, in the end,
irreconcilable.

First and foremost, then, it is critical to be clear about the
context in which the problem first occurred, and from which all
subsequent instances follow. Even before this, however, and as we
have said, we must be absolutely clear about the problem itself
which, in summary, follows:

The Problem Summarized:

We understand by God an absolutely omniscient Being Who is
absolutely good and absolutely powerful.

A being deficient in any of these respects — that is to say,
wanting in knowledge, goodness or power — we do not understand
as God, but as less than God.

An absolutely good, absolutely powerful, and absolutely
omniscient Being would know every instance of evil and would
neither permit it because He is absolutely good, or,
because He is absolutely powerful, would eradicate it.

Suffering and evil, in fact, occur.

Therefore, God, from Whom evil cannot be concealed, cannot be
absolutely good AND absolutely powerful.

If absolutely good, God would eradicate all evil and suffering —
but does not, and therefore, while all-good, He cannot be
all-powerful.

Conversely, if absolutely powerful, then God could abolish evil
and suffering, but does not, and therefore, while all powerful,
He cannot be all good.

Hence, there is no God, for by God we understand a Being perfect
in goodness and power.

Until we are perfectly clear about this, we can go no further.
Unless we fully grasp the magnitude of this problem we cannot hope
to understand the reasons why men either fail to believe in God, or
having once believed, no longer do so. The occurrence, the
experience, of evil, as we had said in our opening, appears as
nothing less than a scandal to believers, and the cause of disbelief
in unbelievers.

It need not be so.

For our part, we must be prepared to follow St. Peter’s exhortation,“being ready always to satisfy everyone that
asketh you a reason of that hope which is in you” (1 St. Peter 3.15). Hence, we begin.

The Solution to the Problem of Evil

As
mentioned earlier, any attempt to come to terms with the problem of
evil vis-à-vis the existence of God inevitably entails linguistic
and conceptual complexities especially in the way of suppressed
premises, or unstated assumptions. It is absolutely essential that
these latent features, these uncritically assumed concepts
long-dormant in language, be made manifest.

What really is the problem of evil, and what really is
the nature of God in its simplest formulation? Can God really be
exculpated? Can He be exonerated of this ontological cancer that we
call evil? And what is the real nature of evil itself? All too often
we are facile with our answers through some articulation of faith
that we are not adequately prepared to defend.

Our confrontation with the problem of evil is the greatest
confrontation of all — for it is, in the end, not only the genesis
of all that we suffer, but remains the apocalyptic culmination of
all that has been and ever will be.

The Solution Summarized

The problem of evil and suffering is a moral
problem with existential consequences that extend to, and are
manifested within, the universe of experience.

The universe of moral discourse within the
context of which alone a discussion of the notion of evil is
possible, is not coherent apart from the notion of volition (the
will; specifically the free will).

Evil, therefore, cannot be understood apart from
moral agency, especially as it pertains to man of whom it is
predicated as either an agent or a casualty. That is to say, man
either causes evil, is a casualty of evil, or both.

An all good and all powerful God would not create
man imperfectly. If He chose to create an imperfect man, He
would not be all-good; if He was unable to do otherwise, He
would not be all-powerful.

Free will is a perfection in man. If we do not
concede that free will is a perfection, then we cannot not
concede to this concession, which is to say we cannot hold
ourselves free to disagree with it, and deem this better (the
penultimate of the superlative perfect) than to be free to
disagree with it. In a word, if free will is not a perfection,
then it pertains more to the notion of perfection that the will
not be free. However, apart from free will there is no universe
of moral discourse; nothing meritorious and nothing blameworthy,
no intention, action, or event in the affairs of men that is
susceptible of being construed as either good or evil — and no
action is good, and conversely, none is evil — for there is no
evil and no good pertaining to the actions of men.

But there is evil.

And there is good.

What is more, if I am not free not to love God,
then my loving God — or anyone or anything else — is without
value, for we do not ascribe the notion of valuation to that
which proceeds of necessity. That the sum of the interior angles
in any triangle is 180 degrees possesses nothing in the way of
valuation. We do not say that it is good or evil. It is
geometrically necessary. If we agree that free will is a
perfection (that it is better to possess free will than not to
possess it), then in creating man, God would have deprived man
of a perfection in his created nature — a notion that would be
inconsistent with either the goodness or the power of God, or
both.
Eve already knew, was acquainted with, good, for the Garden of
Paradise was replete with everything good, and devoid of
anything evil. Eve experienced no want, no privation.

Eve chose to know good and evil.

Eve, by nature created good, therefore chose not
to know good, the first term, with which we was already
naturally acquainted, but the second term, evil. Eve already
knew good but she knew nothing of evil, for only good existed in
the Garden of Paradise, and she herself was created good.

Now, it is not possible to know evil without
experiencing evil, anymore than it is to know good without
experiencing good. We cannot know, understand, comprehend, pain
and suffering without experiencing pain and suffering, any more
than we can know, understand, and comprehend the color blue
without experiencing the color blue.

In choosing to know evil, therefore, Eve
inadvertently, but nevertheless necessarily and concomitantly,
chose to experience evil of which she erstwhile knew nothing. It
was not the case that Eve was conscious or cognitive of the
deleterious nature of evil (for prior to Original Sin, as we
have said, Eve had only known, experienced, good).

What is more, no one chooses what is evil except
that they misapprehend it as a good, for every choice is
ineluctably a choosing of a perceived good, even if the good
perceived is intrinsically evil.

The most evil act is latently a choice of a good
extrinsic to the evil act. Man only acts for, and is motivated
toward, a perceived good, however spurious the perception or the
perceived good. It is impossible to choose an intrinsically evil
act apart from a perceived extrinsic good motivating the
intrinsically evil act. Eve’s choice, while free, was
nevertheless instigated through the malice and lie of the evil
one who deceived Eve that an intrinsic evil —explicitly
prohibited by God — was in fact an intrinsic good, which it was
not. The susceptibility to being deceived does not derogate from
the perfection of man, for the notion of deception is bound up
with the notion of trust, which is an indefeasible good. The
opposite of trust is suspicion which already, and hence
anachronistically, presumes an acquaintance with evil.

In choosing to know evil, Eve’s choice
necessitated, precipitated, those conditions alone through which
evil can be experienced, e.g. death, suffering, illness, pain,
etc. Her choosing to know evil biconditionally entailed the
privation of the good, the first term, through which alone we
understand evil, the second term. Evil is not substantival,
which is to say, evil possesses no being of its own apart from
the good of which it is only privative, a negation in part or
whole. For this reason we see the two terms conjoined in Holy
Scripture in, “ligno autem sciéntiæ boni et mali”, or “the tree
of knowledge of good and evil.”

The existence of the good, does not, as some suggest, still less
necessarily entail, the experience of evil. Adam and Eve in the
state of natural felicity in the Garden of Paradise knew good
apart from any acquaintance with, or any conception of, evil.

Evil necessarily implicates good, but good in no
way necessarily implicates evil. The notion of knowledge by way
of contrast and opposition is confined to relatively few
empirical instances, and always yields nothing of what a thing
is, only that in contradistinction to what it is not. To know
what a thing is not, tells us nothing of what it is. We do not
know the color Blue by its opposition to, its contrast with, or
in contradistinction to, a Not-Blue, for there is no existent
“Not-Blue”. There are only other colors we distinguish from Blue
— but we do so without invoking the notion of contrast or
opposition. I do not know Blue as “Not-Red” (or, for that
matter, through invoking any or all the other colors). I know
Blue in the experience of Blue only. If there is an “opposite”
of Blue, or a corresponding negative to Blue, it can only be the
absence of color — not simply another color that is “not-Blue”,
for in that case every other color would be the opposite of Blue
— and the opposite of every other color as well.

Once again, in Eve’s choosing to know evil, she
consequently and concomitantly chose the conditions under which
alone such knowledge was possible. Among the conditions
informing such knowledge were death, suffering, pain — and all
that we associate with evil and understand by evil.

Far from being culpable, God warned Adam and Eve
to avoid the, “the tree of knowledge of good and evil.”

To argue that the goodness of God is compromised
by His injunction against the plenitude of knowledge through His
forbidding them to eat of the “tree of knowledge of good and
evil” is spurious inasmuch as it holds knowledge, and not
felicity, to be the greatest good possible to man. In
withholding complete knowledge, it is mistakenly argued, God
deprived man of an intrinsic good.

Felicity, or complete happiness, not omniscience,
or complete knowledge, is man’s greatest good, and only that
which redounds to happiness is good for man, not that which
redounds to knowledge, and the two do not entirely coincide.

To maintain that to know evil, suffering,
illness, death … and unhappiness … redounds to man’s happiness
is an irreconcilable contradiction. Evil is a privation of the
good; consequently, to choose evil is to choose a privation of
the good, specifically that which vitiates or diminishes the
good.

To maintain, furthermore, that man can know evil,
suffering, illness, and death without experiencing evil,
suffering, illness and death is equally subreptive. By this line
of reasoning, one whose vision is color-deficient can know the
color Purple without ever experiencing the color Purple; know
what is bitter without experiencing bitterness; know “hot”
without experiencing hotness. Purple, bitterness, hot — evil,
suffering, illness, death (all that we understand by “evil”) are
not concepts (in the way, for example, that a simple binomial
equation (1+1=2) is a concept independent of anything
existentially enumerable) but experiences, the knowledge of
which demands the experience and cannot be acquired apart from
it anymore than pain can be known apart the experience of pain.
Pain, illness, suffering, death, etc. are in no way inherently,
intrinsically good. No one who has experienced the death of a
loved one, the pain of an injury, or illness of any sort will
maintain that such knowledge acquired through these experiences
redounds to their felicity; that their “knowledge” of any of
these evils either promotes or contributes to their happiness.

God, then, is in no way culpable of, nor
responsible for, the existence of evil. The occurrence or
experience of evil derogates neither from His goodness, nor
detracts from His power.

If God is all good, He would confer the
perfection of freedom upon man in Adam and Eve. If He is all
powerful He would permit the exercise of this freedom.

To confer the perfection of freedom of will upon
man does not eo ipso imply that the exercise of the will
necessarily involves a choosing between the good and the
not-good or the less good, still less a choice between good and
evil. Presumably the exercise of this freedom prior to the Fall
was exercised in choices between things of themselves inherently
good, albeit distinguishable in attributes. The fig and the pear
are equally good in nature, but differing in attributes, and to
choose the one over the other is not to imply that the one is
good and the other not-good or even less-good. The choosing to
eat the one and not the other is a choice among alternative
goods.

Nor is the thing not chosen “less good” in itself
than that which is chosen. It is good proper to its nature. The
pear and the fig are equally nutritious.

The notion of choice is only coherent in the
context of right reason. Choice (the exercise of free will), is
never gratuitous, but is always in accordance with reason which
alone mediates the choice to a coherent end. What we choose, we
choose to coherent ends. In other words, we choose for a reason
— and not spontaneously or gratuitously. Choices are always
ordered to ends, however disordered the choices themselves may
be.

One does not, for example, choose as the means to
nutrition, a stone rather than a fig. The choosing of the fig
does not imply that the stone is not good. On the other hand,
one does not choose figs to build a house, rather than stones.
This does not imply that the fig is not good. The nature of the
fig redounds to nutrition, while the nature of the stone does
not, and the nature of the stone redounds to building while the
nature of the fig does not. One can still choose to eat stones
or to build with figs, but such choices do not accord with
ordered reason, which of itself is also an intrinsic good.

Only God can bring good out of evil He does not
will but nevertheless permits through having conferred the
perfection of freedom upon man. While God could not have endowed
man with this perfection without simultaneously permitting the
consequences necessary and intrinsic to it, He is not Himself
the Author of the evil but of that perfection in man through
which — not of necessity (for man is never compelled to choose
inasmuch as compulsion by definition abrogates choice) — man
chooses evil and subsequently becomes the agent of it.

The occurrence of evil, consequently, is neither
inconsistent with nor contrary to the notion of God as
absolutely good and absolutely powerful.

“Now
the serpent was more subtle than any of the beasts of the earth
which the Lord God made. And He said to the woman: Why hath God
commanded you that you should not eat of every tree of paradise? And
the woman answered Him, saying: Of the fruit of the trees that are
in paradise we do eat: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the
midst of paradise, God hath commanded us that we should not eat; and
that we should not touch it, lest perhaps we die. And the serpent
said to the woman: No, you shall not die the death. For God doth
know that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall
be opened: and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” (Sed et
serpens erat callídior cunctis animántibus terræ quæ fécerat Dóminus
Deus. Qui dixit ad mulíerem: Cur præcépit vobis Deus ut non
comederétis de omni ligno paradísi? Cui respóndit múlier: De fructu
lignórum, quæ sunt in paradíso, véscimur: de fructu vero ligni quod
est in médio paradísi, præcépit nobis Deus ne comederémus, et ne
tangerémus illud, ne forte moriámur. Dixit autem serpens ad mulíerem:
Nequáquam morte moriémini. Scit enim Deus quod in quocúmque die
comedéritis ex eo, aperiéntur óculi vestri, et éritis sicut dii,
sciéntes bonum et malum.) (Genesis
3.1-5)

Concerning the Genesis of Evil

As
one reader pointed out, the argument above does not address the
genesis of evil ab initio:

It “does not address the
idea of the origin of evil. It does not explain how evil
came about. It does not exonerate God or explain the conclusion that
He did not create in some way, either directly or indirectly, what
we call “evil”.

This is a point well taken. The argument thus far articulated is
clearly framed within the Biblical context in which it first
presents itself to us, and as such may be understood as a type of
epoche, or bracketed narrative, the authenticity of which we
assume as Catholics — not necessarily apart from discursive
reasoning, but not articulated exclusively or even largely in terms
of it either. Whatever we can speculate upon regarding the origin of
evil, of one thing only can we be certain: that the origin of
evil is radicated in the will.

If we seek an ontological genesis of evil we shall not find one
simply because what we understand as evil is a privation of being
and not constituting, let alone instantiating, a being itself whose
ontology is tautologically reciprocal with evil. In the strictest
sense, there is no purely evil being. This is tantamount to saying
there is a being nothing, or, alternately, a nothing being. It is an
oxymoron. This is also not to say that there is no single being, or
categories of beings, from which the good has been exhaustively, but
not totally, deprived, and we understand such beings as evil not in
the sense of what they possess in their being but in the sense of
what is deficient in their being: specifically the good in whatever
measure — and precisely by that measure are they construed as evil.
In that inverted and ever mimicking world of evil, just as there are
differing magnitudes of goodness in the holy, there are differing
magnitudes of the absence of goodness in the evil. As some are to
greater or lesser degrees holy, so to greater or lesser degrees are
the evil. The ultimate expression of this near total privation of
the good is personal because it pertains to a will, and the person
in whose will we find this nearly ultimate extinction of the good we
understand as s@^@-, or the devil.

Apart from a coherent notion of the will we find nothing to which we
can assign moral predicates, nothing inculpatory or exculpatory,
praiseworthy or blameworthy, no sanctity and no sin; we find no
world of moral discourse. Just as the will is the radix bonorum,
it is the radix malorum as well.

To speculate upon the radix malorum ab initio (the root of
all evil from the beginning) is to speculate upon the first instance
of the corruption of the will. We have no Scriptural narrative to
which we can appeal in answering this and thus no phenomenological
bracket (epoche) in which to address it as Catholics.
Consequently, every effort will be, at best, conjectural. We at
least know that it pertained to freedom, specifically freedom of the
will apart from which there is no moral discussion. We have no
narrative through which we can answer the question of why, in the
first instance, satan sinned through a willful refusal to cooperate
with God. It has been speculated upon by theologians throughout
history as attributable to pride (e.g. concerning the Incarnation of
Jesus Christ in the Immaculate womb of Mary and the angelic pride
this instigated through the refusal to worship God Who became man (Verbum
caro factum est4) — man who was created less than the angels 5
— for the sake of our salvation 6 and to Whom, as True
God and True Man 7, worship is due), itself an expression
of the will. Thus, while the circumstances surrounding the first
defection of the free will from the supremely good will of God can
only be speculated upon, the free will of satan nevertheless is
resolved into a causa sui, a cause in and of itself
originating from no prior cause that would subvert or attenuate the
notion of the authenticity of the free will itself.

FURTHER OBJECTIONS ANSWERED

The
following questions were submitted and the line of reasoning is
instructive in further elaborating the problem of evil and a
coherent response to it. I have abbreviated the questions and
eliminated redundancies in them for the sake of concision and
clarity. Because they are common objections, it is well to state
them and answer them in turn.

Objection 1:
Why does evil exist in the first place?
“I
don't think it's necessary as such to pin-point the precise time or
place when the first evil thought or act took place, as we should
only really be concerned about why it exists in the first place.”Reply:
The possibility (not the actuality) of evil understood as the
privation of good is the condition of the free will. To argue that
evil “exists” as a necessary condition to our understanding or
apprehending the good (of the sort, “unless we do not know pain we
cannot know its opposite, pleasure — which is a discredited
argument, for we do not, in fact, know pleasure merely in
contradistinction from pain. There are many types of pain. Does each
have its opposite in pleasure as a necessary condition to
experiencing that pain? If, so, then please tell me what the
opposite and corresponding pleasure is to having forcefully struck
ones thumb with a hammer and experiencing the resulting pain. Is it
is pleasurable thumb? Of course, this is a reduction ad absurdam
and need not be pursued.

ObjectionII:The Paradigm of the Perfect Programmer
“If
we can look at this situation in an analogous way, God could be
likened to a programmer, they create something. The programmer has
the knowledge and certain foresight to predict how his program would
run, he creates his program so that it is safe for the user to run,
he has safe-guarded it against attacks as best as he knows how, but
eventually over time, due to his finite knowledge, a loophole is
found and another user hacks it, or renders it into something for
malicious intent.

Reply:
Your analogy fails altogether. Programmers do not create — nor is
their “knowledge” in any way possessed of the apodictic certainty
that we find invested in, say, analytical propositions such that any
possible outcome must follow — and necessarily so — from
irrefragable premises. Programmers do not bring something into
existence ex nihilo; they merely synthetize, constructing
source code from already existing binary information into object
code. Yes? This is no mere carping. Linguistic precision is
absolutely necessary to any plausible explication of the problem
evil. You could as well have used a child with Lego’s and wheels as
your analogue. This is not being unkind. It is merely being
necessarily clear.

Nor is it the case that God is not omniscient, unlike the
programmer. I earnestly suggest you read David Hume’s analysis of
the Problem of Induction in his Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding — it is first year freshman philosophy, and very
accessible — understanding this will help you see in the problem
inherent in your argument. In so many words, all the possible
combinations considered by your hypothetical programmer not merely
cannot be logically anticipated, but even the first presumed causal
nexus between the source language and the low level compiler is only
probable at best in resulting in any intended executable — and may
result in something quite different in the next instance.

Objection III: The Omniscience of God Necessarily Implicates God in
Evil“God is omniscient, He knows
the results of his actions over an infinite period of time, He knew
when that first instance of evil would arise, so in a sense they
[the programmer and God] are very alike, but yet very different
because God should by definition have (or be able to) create a
scenario( program) where no fault arises (evil).”

Reply: In other words, God could have created a non-moral universe … and
such a universe would be the best of all possible worlds … This is a
very old argument that would be tiresome to recapitulate, and I
suggest that you read it at your leisure. To cut to the chase, God
could have created a world of automatons, in your estimation,
incapable of choosing evil because there would be no evil from which
to choose. Essentially it is a universe without moral predicates —
which would, eo ipso, be a universal within which there would
be no will or volition to which alone moral predication is
coherently both ascribable and attributable. But a world without
will or volition is not a moral world. There still could be choices
between competing goods, but we could not say of such choices that
they possess moral predicates. We could still choose, but we could
only choose good, which is tantamount to saying that we have no
moral choice. All possible choices would be good. What is chosen
would always be good — but we have argued that evil is radicated in
the will. Then every will would necessarily be good and incapable of
evil. A necessarily good will would necessarily always choose the
good even were the good to coexist with evil (even understood as
something substantival, which it is not, rather than as a privation
of the good, which it is). So, once again, a notion of authentic
choice is essentially subverted. What is chosen would always be good
and the will which chooses would be indefectibly good. A coherent
concept of moral agency under such conditions is impossible. No
choice is laudable, because it is necessary, and nothing chosen is
other than good.

To understand the will as the origin of all moral agency, even as it
expresses itself materially, and at that the same time also ask what
is the origin of the free will is to ask what is the origin of the
origin. This question results in an absurd tautology. “What
motivates the will to will?” is a question that
is regressive ad infinitum unless the will is understood as
the motivating agency itself capable of appropriating
distinguishable choices freely.

Objection IV: Evil is not in the Will
“I
also do not agree with your statement:
“that
the origin of evil is radicated in the will." - I think the original
of evil maybe realized through free will, but not radicated. For
evil cannot occur without there having been a framework for it to
occur, in other words the potential for evil to occur must exist for
it to have any chance of it existing, and that potential has existed
with creation, and hence the creator's hand has been explicitly and
solely a part of that."

Reply:
That necessary framework we understand to be libero voluntate,
the freedom of the will, which is recognized as a perfection
accorded man by God; id est, to be endowed with, rather than
deprived of, freedom is conceded to be an eminent good redounding to
the perfection of man. Moreover, evil is a privation of the good,
and the “framework” for the very possibility of evil is the good of
which alone it is privative. To argue that there can be a
“framework” apart from the good in which alone evil can occur is
contradictory since it is precisely a privation of the good by which
we understand the concept of evil.

Objection V: Evil Contradicts God's Omnipotence
“If
God has had no hand in creating evil, then that implies that's an
element of creation that he has had no control over and that
ultimately in his will to create something good he had to have evil
necessarily tied in, which contradicts omnipotence, and necessarily
implicates him as culpable."

Reply:Evil, as we have repeatedly said, is ontological privation — not, as
you appear to suggest, a being of some mysterious sort. It is a
privation of what should be. It is much like asking why God created
nothing, or the absence of something that should be. One cannot —
even God —“create” nothing. God can choose not the create something,
but He cannot chose to create nothing, for nothing is the negation
of something, and even if it were possible for nothing to be created
without contradiction, what would we call it? Nothing. It is a
circular, contradictory argument. What is more, all that God created
is good according to the Genesis account.

Objection 6: The Omnipotence of God and Evil in the Fallen Angels
“Let's
consider the practically observable source of evil, I take it that
the rebelliousness of man is the result or at least a part of the
actions of Lucifer? If God is omnipotent and omniscient, then He
would have foreseen the actions of Lucifer before creating him.
Given the infinite powers of God as implied by Scripture, it would
have been possible for him to create an angel like Lucifer that he
would have known would not have strayed.”

Reply:
“… practically observable source of evil … ”? I do not
understand this statement, so cannot answer it. I will conjecture
that you are suggesting that God could have created the angels less perfectly, or possessed of a lesser degree of
perfection than we find in the perfection of free will with which He
endowed them? But then God would not be perfectly good were He to
withhold a perfection in justice due the created nature of a being.

______________________

1
St. Luke 10.18
2 Apart from the diabolical, by whose instigation Eve was
deceived. The provenance of this primeval malice which antecedes the
creation of man is the topic of another subject. Evil was in no way
intrinsic to the Garden of Paradise. Happiness was. The intrusion of
evil upon nature through supernatural artifice only indicates the
pre-existence of supernatural evil apart from nature
which was created good. While chronologically antecedent to
nature it was not manifest within it, even while concurrent with
it, for the two — the natural and the supernatural — are
ontologically distinct. The present argument purposes to explain the
origin of evil as it touches upon human existence enacted in
nature, not the provenance of evil as it pertains to diabolical
being enacted in thesupernatural.
3 De Divinis Nominibus 4.31, (Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite);
Summa Theologica, Question 103 Article 8 (St. Thomas
Aquinas), etc.
4
St. John 1.145 Hebrews 2.7 & 6 Philippians 2:77
Symbolum Nicaenum
- Nicene Creed – circa 325 A.D.
“
... by one man's offence death reigned ..."
(Romans 5.17)
“For
God created man incorruptible, and to the image of His own likeness
he made him. But by the envy of the devil, death came into the
world."
(Wisdom 2.23-24)